The Playboy Readers' Sex Survey

part four

In January 1982, Playboy published a 133-item questionnaire that asked its readers to report on their sexual habits, altitudes and identities. More than 100,000 readers responded. We tabulated the results and ran an introductory article in January 1983.

We followed that in March with an article that explored the effects of marital status on sexuality, and in our May issue, we examined the subject of sexual identity and discovered that it is possibly the most important factor in determining many aspects of a person's sexual behavior. In that article, we reported that many social stereotypes about gay men and women are false, while some clichés about both male and female homosexual attitudes and practices are probably true. We also found that bisexual men seem least likely to have comfortable and satisfying sex lives, while bisexual women seem to have more fun than anybody else—straight men and women, homosexuals or bisexual men.

This month, we turn to the world of sexual experimentation and try to find the answers to several questions: What is experimental sex these days and what is not? Are some people more likely to experiment than others? Does experimental sex mean better sex?

What Is Experimental Sex?

There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —Shakespeare

Anyone who still wonders whether or not there has been a sexual revolution is going to be convinced right here. Anal intercourse, sex with more than one person at a time, bondage, vibrators and other sexual devices are at the center of a sea change in sexual activity. They represent a search for variety and proficiency; and a careful reading of the results of our survey makes it clear that many are ready to stay the course.

Anyone who tries to define sexual experimentation risks being caught in a twilight zone of definitions, to say nothing of behavior. An erotic activity that is one couple's routine foreplay may for another couple be a total barf-out. It reminds us of a cartoon we once saw in which a knobby-kneed man dressed in a fish costume, flippers and an inner tube, his face adorned with fake nose and eyeglasses, stands expectantly in his bedroom doorway. His wife, seated unconcernedly on the bed, looks at him and says, "Oh, no, not that again."

Whatever the gentleman in the cartoon has in mind, it's a good bet that most people would find it outside the realm of normal sex. But what's normal? In the Forties, Kinsey found that less than half the population had ever engaged in oral sex. One could say that if normal sex were what most people were doing, then oral sex was considered abnormal. Today, oral sex is considered normal.

As another example of how sexual attitudes change from generation to generation, while Kinsey acknowledged that some heterosexuals in his study had engaged in anal sex (manual stimulation of the anus or anal intercourse), their numbers were so small that he couldn't justify including them. But when Morton Hunt published his Sexual Behavior in the 1970s, he found that half of the young marrieds considered manual-anal foreplay acceptable, more than a third of them had no objection to anal-oral foreplay and only about a quarter of all men and women agreed with the statement "Anal intercourse between a man and a woman is wrong." In 1977, The Redbook Report on Female Sexuality asserted that almost half of the women had tried anal intercourse at least once. (Our survey's percentages are even higher, and we'll review them later in the article.)

Because what is normal and abnormal (or deviant) is debatable, we prefer to use the terms customary and experimental. Customary behavior is that which our survey and others have shown to be experienced by the vast majority of Americans: masturbation, mutual masturbation (petting), intercourse and oral sex. Experimental sex, in the broad sense, is everything else.

However, when it comes to defining experimentation in terms of a particular person or couple, subjective factors become far more important than statistics. For one couple, for whom sex is a predictable three-stage affair consisting of kissing, manual genital stimulation and intercourse, the introduction of massage with scented oils as a part of foreplay could be rather daring. For another couple, to whom massage is an acceptable and tame aspect of lovemaking, viewing a pornographic film together or taking a vibrator to bed may be a more ground-breaking experience. If there is one generalization to be made about any kind of experimentation, it's that it should add more fun to one's sex life; and for most men and not a few women, more variety means more fun. Variety means many things but may be usefully separated into four categories:

1. Variety in physical stimulation: exploring areas of the body different from those you've tried before. Anal sex, oral sex (for the few who haven't yet tried it) and diverse forms of nongenital stimulation (sucking a person's toes or fingers, for instance) all fall into this category.

2. Changes in location: Doing it on the kitchen table and in the back-yard hammock are examples. Or, for those who find an extra thrill in the possibility of being caught, having sex in one's office with the door unlocked or having a quickie in the bathroom of an airplane. The back seat of a taxi or a limousine can provide a daring but relatively safe idyl for couples who fancy performing before a live audience.

3. Varying partners: That can mean wife swapping, making love with more than one person at a time or having sex with a stranger.

4. Using props, gadgets and other enhancers: Those include sexy underwear (garter belts, open-crotch panties and so on), erotic films, vibrators, those novel condoms that come in colors and have rubber protuberances to (theoretically) give more stimulation to the female, handcuffs and other bondage equipment.

Some sexual or quasi-sexual practices, performed by a small segment of the population, are closer to sexual fetish than to sexual experimentation. But we included four of those activities—sadomasochism, golden showers, transvestism and coprophilia—in our survey to provide us with an indication of whether or not more people practice the truly bizarre than did a decade ago, when Hunt reported that persons who said they did those things were extremely rare.

It turns out that they're still pretty rare. The number of people who say they've tried sadomasochism (seven percent of the men and eight percent of the women) is only marginally higher than Hunt found a decade ago.

We suspect that our statistics on the people who claim to have tried golden showers (six percent of the men and seven percent of the women) and coprophilia (three percent of the men and four percent of the women) are inadequate because many of those completing our questionnaire don't know exactly what they are.

Associate Editor Barbara Nellis, who supervised both the construction of the survey and the tabulation of the results, says, "I had at least two dozen calls from readers around the country who wanted to know what coprophilia meant. One guy called at eight in the morning. I told him it was too early to be discussing the subject, as I'd just had breakfast." For those of you who don't know, it's an inordinate fondness for shit. Several people called to ask the meaning of golden showers. "My pat answer," says Nellis, "was 'urinating on a loved one.' "

Both of those practices are fetishistic in nature: They tend to be substitutes for direct sexual contact. We found, when cross-tabulating other personal characteristics, that those who have engaged in those activities have less active sex lives (with people, that is; shoes, dirty underpants and Fido don't count) than do those who say they have tried none of them.

By contrast, when we tabulated the personal characteristics of those respondents who have tried some of the other experimental practices listed in our survey, we found that those men and women generally have full, active and satisfying sex lives and seem to engage in and enjoy customary sex with the same or greater frequency than the general population. In other words, those people, like most of us, aren't using sexual experimentation to substitute for customary sex but are adding it to their conventional sex lives.

And, as a group, the people who have tried one or more sexual varieties are more satisfied with their sex lives and consider themselves better lovers than people whose experience has been limited to customary sex. Apparently, the First Century Roman writer Publilius Syrus was right when he wrote, "No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety."

Let's take a close look at each of the seven most popular forms of experimentation.

Erotic Devices

I opened the book at a picture of a plump, leering, lecherous-looking woman squatting and pissing on the floor and holding a dark-red, black-haired, thick-lipped cunt open with her fingers. All sorts of little bawdy sketches were round the margin of the picture. The early editions of "Fanny Hill" had that frontispiece.

She was flabbergasted, silent. Then she burst out laughing, stopped and said, "What a nasty book—such books ought to be burnt." ...

I turned over a page. "Look, here she is with a boy who sold her water cresses; is not his prick a big one?"

She looked on silently; I heard her breathing hard. I turned over picture after picture. Suddenly, she knocked the book out of my hand to the other side of the room. "I won't see such things," said she.

"Won't you look at it by yourself?"

"If you leave it here, I'll burn it."

"No you won't; you'll take it to bed with you."

There I left (continued on page 192) Sex Survey (continued from page 132) the book lying; it was open and the frontispiece showing. "Look at her legs," said I, for we could see the picture as we sat on the sofa; and I began to kiss and tickle her again.

—Anonymous, "My Secret Life"

Eighty-six percent of the heterosexual men and 82 percent of the heterosexual women in our survey say they have used one or more of five aids to sexual excitement: erotic books, erotic movies, sexy underwear, oils and vibrators. The most popular for both men and women is erotic literature. Contrary to the widely held notion that women don't get off on pornography, 52 percent of the women in our survey tell us they have used erotic literature to enhance sex. That's a higher percentage than among the men (42 percent).

By contrast, only a third of the women in Kinsey's study reported arousal at the sight of portrayals of sexual action in photographs, drawings or movies. (Perhaps if the chronicler of My Secret Life had known that, he would have put more effort into getting his coquettish friend to read Fanny Hill and would have skipped the pictures.)

Kinsey noted that when it came to pornography, there was "no end to amateur portrayals of sexual action," and that "the failure of nearly all females to find erotic arousal in such portrayals is ... well known." Yet he found that commercial motion pictures with erotic content—including love scenes with close-ups of petting and kissing and the occasional seminude body—had an effect on women different from that of pornographic films: "Females found the moving pictures erotically stimulating somewhat more often than the males."

It's possible that the vastly improved quality of pornographic films these days (replete with color, sound, music and even—occasionally—a semi-intelligent plot and fairly decent actors) makes them more appealing to women than they used to be (42 percent of our women and 38 percent of our men say they watch them). Certainly, video cassettes have enabled more women than ever before not only to watch top-quality porn films but to watch them at home. In bed. With a man. Perhaps with a drink or a joint (59 percent of our female respondents say they use drugs—have at least tried them once—to stimulate sex). Another reason for women's increased interest in and arousal by pornographic films—a phenomenon also recorded by Redbook, which reported that 60 percent of the wives in its survey used pornography—may lie in the findings of two West German sex researchers, Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch, who have found that sex differences in sexual excitability are closely related to "the grade of sexual emancipation of women in a society." In other words, as reflected in our survey and others, the more nearly equal men and women become, the less difference there is in their response to explicit sexual material.

She shrieked, laughed, got away and rushed to the door. I brought her back, desisted from tickling and lewd talking, though I was getting randier than ever.

"Now have the garters—let me put one round the leg, just to see how it looks—just halfway up the calf."

After much persuasion, after pulling up my trousers and showing how a garter looked round my calf, she partly consented. "Promise you won't tickle me."

I promised everything.

—"My Secret Life"

Half of the women and almost a third of the men in our survey say they have ever used sexy underwear to enhance sex. We have no way of knowing how many of them use it with great frequency, but we imagine that most couples use it for an occasional routine breaker rather than as a regular ritual. One married woman wrote to us that one night, her husband came home "in his adult clothes, with his adult briefcase, and I met him at the door in black lace, handed him a glass of wine and undressed him. He was so stunned that he just played along. Then, in my black bra, garter belt and black stockings, I got down on the floor and sucked him off."

Although it's easy to assume that women's greater likelihood of wearing sexy underwear can be solely attributed to sexual custom—the woman is more likely to dress erotically for the man than the man is for the woman—that view takes only the man's psyche into consideration. Some women may enjoy dressing up in sexy underwear almost as much as men like to see them in it. At any rate, if all the women who wear sexy underwear are as creative as the one we quote above, who really cares why they do it?

That leaves oils and the vibrator. What can we say about oils? They're nice, they smell good and they feel good. Thirty-seven percent of the men and 39 percent of the women who responded to our questionnaire have used oils. Oh, yes—and they're rapidly becoming a major minor industry. Several shops that specialize in oils for bath and massage have opened in large cities around the country. A lot of folks are obviously having a slippery good time.

An electric vibrator can sometimes be a very welcome laborsaving device. It can hasten the achievement of first orgasm by providing a more sustained and efficient stimulus to the clitoris. Then, gradually, as you become more confident of your clitoral response, you will be able to dispense with the vibrator and obtain the same response from your fingers. Finally ... to your great delight you will find yourself responding with orgasm to the caresses provided by your partner.

Michael And Dorothy Clarke, "Sexual Joy in Marriage"

That advice, written to help pre-orgasmic women experience the Big O, has been evident in sex manuals for the past decade. Coinciding with the proliferation of kudos for the vibrator as the surefire method of taking a woman over the brink, vibrators have, over the past ten years, become America's favorite ladies' home companion.

Although most sex therapists, like the Clarkes, encourage women to move past the vibrator to flesh-to-flesh orgasm, many women linger awhile with the plastic love buzzer. Half of the women in our survey say they have used a vibrator at some time, and a third of the men say they have tried it at least once. We presume the majority of them use a vibrator to help stimulate their partners.

It's interesting to note that 21 percent of the women in the Redbook survey used sexual gadgets—a considerably lower figure than we received from our women respondents (76 percent). However, that is consistent with female Playboy readers' responses throughout our survey. Our female respondents seem to be more experimental overall than those in other sex surveys.

Anal Intercourse

"Don't talk loud," said she, "it will never do to let anyone know what we are at." ...

Then she carefully greased my prick with pomatum and put some on her arse-hole; it was the work of a minute, not a word was said. She then, stark-naked, sat by the side of me on the sofa, began fondling and kissing me.... Then she turned round.

"Put it in," she said when her rump was toward me, "then give me your hand and don't push till I tell you."

Her arsehole was at the level of my prick as I stood by the side of the sofa; my machine was like a rod of iron; my brains seemed on fire. I felt I was going to do something wrong, dreaded it, yet determined to do it.

"Put it in slowly," said she in a whisper. The hole opened, felt tight; but to my astonishment, almost directly, my whole prick was hidden in it without pain to me or any difficulty.

"Give me your hand." I did. Again she began frigging herself with my fingers. "Rub, rub, push gently," she, said, and I tried, but was getting past myself.

"Now," said she with a spasmodic sort of half cry, half grunt. I felt my prick squeezed as in a vise. I shoved or, rather, scarcely began to do so when I discharged a week's reserve up her rectum.... I pulled it out with an indescribable horror of myself.

"Wasn't it delicious?" said she. "I like it, don't you?" —"My Secret Life"

Kinsey observed that some men and women are "as aroused erotically by anal stimulation as they are by stimulation of the genitalia," or even more intensely aroused. He also said that men and women who engage in anal intercourse often report satisfaction comparable to that found in vaginal intercourse, but he said he had found too few instances of anal intercourse to warrant focusing on it as significant American sexual behavior. Thirty years later, Hunt discovered that more than half of all men and women found it an acceptable practice, and the 1977 Redbook report indicated that almost half of the women had tried it at least once. Anal intercourse, for our readers, is even more popular, so it's not surprising that 47 percent of the men and 61 percent of the women in our survey have tried it.

As the passage from My Secret Life shows, anal intercourse was once something done only in the greatest secrecy, as it was (and still is) considered an abomination in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is still illegal in many states. The increased interest in experimenting with it is no doubt due to its no longer being an unmentionable act (thanks to such books as Lady Chatterley's Lover, which has a delicately worded anal-intercourse scene, and such movies as Last Tango in Paris, in which Marlon Brando tries it with all of America watching).

There is also the likelihood that anal intercourse has always been more popular than researchers suspected but simply wasn't talked about because it was considered dirty, sinful and perverted in the eyes of society. As it became a mentionable subject (thanks partly to Kinsey), greater numbers of people began to admit to having done it.

If we follow the trends in sex research, using oral sex as an example, it seems that activities that a sizable minority of people are trying in one decade may, a decade or two later, become a routine part of sex.

It's very dangerous to stick it up a woman's ass. It tends to make them more promiscuous. I'll leave that with your readers.... They can test it out. Those who are scientifically inclined can immediately approach their mate and tool her, if they're able. Then they can observe what happens, watch her at parties, get a private detective, check up on her.... A woman doesn't want it up the ass, because she's doing her best to be faithful to that dull pup she's got for a man, and she knows if it blasts into the center of her stubbornness, that's the end of it. She won't be able to hold on to fidelity any longer. That's one explanation. It doesn't have to be true. But you might ponder it.

—Norman Mailer, "Pieces and Pontifications"

We're not sure we agree with Mailer that anal intercourse makes women more promiscuous, but our survey indicates that it is a sort of watershed of experimental sex, the gate through which one most likely passes on the journey into the land of noncustomary sex. Eighty-two percent of both men and women who have tried anal intercourse have also tried one or more other kinds of experimental sex (anal-oral contact, talking dirty during sex, a ménage à trois [or more] or bondage).

Anal intercourse is also the station along the path of experimentation where people are most likely to decide that customary sex is quite enough, thank you. When we asked how often readers who had tried it had anal intercourse, 41 percent of the males and 63 percent of the females who hadn't tried any other variety of sexual experimentation said they had tried it only once. One woman, apparently turned off by the memory of her only experience with it, wrote in the margin of her questionnaire, "Never again!"

However, it seems that those people who continue to practice anal intercourse not only are more likely to enjoy it the more they do it but also are more likely to think of themselves as good lovers. Eighty-seven percent of the men and 85 percent of the women who have had anal intercourse say they are good lovers, while only 78 percent of the men and 77 percent of the women who haven't tried it rate themselves good lovers. Men who have tried anal sex also seem to find their sex lives more satisfying: About 66 percent of them say their sex lives are satisfying, compared with only 57 percent of those who haven't tried it. There is virtually no difference in the level of satisfaction between women in our survey who have and those who haven't tried it, but the Redbook survey found that "the more often a woman has anal sex, and the more she finds it pleasurable, the happier she is with her sex life."

"More often" in that context could refer to either the frequency of anal intercourse or the total number of times a woman has done it; and we think it probably means the latter. According to our survey, most people who add this variation to their lovemaking do it infrequently. Twenty-eight percent of the men and 27 percent of the women who continue to practice anal intercourse after the first time say they do it less than once a month. One percent of the men and two percent of the women do it once a week, and only two percent of men and women do it from two to seven times weekly. Apparently, the more active a person's sex life, the more likely he or she is to have frequent anal intercourse. Of the men who say they have intercourse once a day or more, 13 percent also have anal intercourse once or twice a month, and another 12 percent do it once a week or more. By contrast, of the men who say they have sex only once a week, only three percent also have anal intercourse once a week. Women follow roughly the same pattern. It's hard to say whether people who have high sex drives are more prone (pardon the pun) to anal intercourse or whether the more time you spend making love, the more likely you are to explore what D. H. Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, called a secret place. Probably both are true.

Occupation and educational level apparently have little impact on a person's decision to try anal intercourse. We found that the distribution of those who had experimented with it was just about equal in all classifications. Women in their 20s and 30s are more likely to try it than their older and younger counterparts, while men in their 30s are more likely to try it than all other age groups. Marital status also has some relationship to the likelihood of a person's trying it. Fewer than half of our married and single male respondents have done it, while more than 60 percent of those who are divorced, remarried or cohabiting have tried it. The same pattern holds true for women. Nearly three quarters of the remarried women have tried it, compared with 59 percent of the women who are in their first marriage. That fits with our finding that first-time-married and single people are somewhat less experimental than those who are cohabiting, divorced, widowed or remarried.

Mailer's statement that once a woman has anal intercourse she's likely to become promiscuous may have some basis in fact. Using two measures of promiscuity—whether or not a person has offered sex to a stranger and the number of sex partners a person has had—we found that women who fulfill both are more likely to have tried anal sex. It's hard to say, however, which came first for those women—promiscuity or anal intercourse.

Anal-oral Sex

Just trust me when I tell you that a guy's asshole is his most prized spot. And if he's aware of it, your mouth on his ass is crossing a line in his book and can be a powerful turn-on. I tell my boyfriend that his asshole is his pussy and that I can put my tongue and my fingers into his pussy. The imagery gives him enormous erections. I put my tongue into his ass and rub his penis at, the same time. It gives me a buzz just writing about it.

Female Respondent, Early 20s, Some College, Single

Feuille de rose: Tongue stimulation of the anus and perineum in either sex. Not unaesthetic if you wash carefully and happens naturally in a lot of tongue play, but don't do it if you don't like the idea—or be afraid to suggest it if you do. —Alex Comfort, "The Joy of Sex"

Apparently, quite a few people like the idea. Thirty-six percent of the men and 39 percent of the women who answered our questionnaire have tried feuille de rose. Women under 21 are the most likely to have tried it (42 percent); the likelihood of engaging in anal-oral contact gradually declines in older age groups. The largest percentage of men falls into the 30-39 age group, but experience with anal-oral sex in all age groups is about the same, ranging from 33 to 39 percent for men and from 34 to 42 percent for women.

Education, income and occupation don't seem to have much impact on a person's inclination to try anal-oral sex. Sexual identity and marital status seem to have more relationship to a person's experience with this practice than any other factors.

Homosexual and bisexual men are far more likely than heterosexual men to have tried it. Nearly two thirds of homosexual men and nearly three out of five bisexual men say they've had anal-oral sex, compared with 34 percent of heterosexual men. Bisexual women are much more likely to have tried it than either heterosexual or homosexual women. About 60 percent of bisexual women, compared with 37 percent of heterosexual women and 39 percent of homosexual women, have shared feuille de rose with a lover.

And, as with most experimental sexual activities, people who are divorced, widowed, remarried or cohabiting are slightly more likely than married or single people to have had this experience.

The main question, however, is, Are the folks who do it having more fun than those who don't? With men, the answer is probably yes. Of those who have experienced that form of stimulation, 65 percent say their sex lives are satisfactory and 86 percent say they're good lovers. Of those who have never tasted it, only 59 percent say their sex lives are satisfactory and 80 percent consider themselves good lovers. For women, anal-oral sex doesn't have much impact on sexual satisfaction—about 77 percent of both women who have and women who haven't tried it say they are satisfied with their sex lives. But it does contribute to a woman's self-image. Eighty-five percent of women who have done it rate themselves good lovers, compared with 79 percent of those who haven't.

People who have tried anal-oral sex tend to be more adventuresome with other experimental behavior than those who have never tried it. As might be expected, they're likely (60 percent of the men and 71 percent of the women) to have tried anal intercourse. And they're also more likely to have talked dirty during sex.

By the way, if you're wondering what feuille de rose means, it's "rose leaf"—a reference to the vague similarity in appearance between the anus and a rosebud (a poetic, idealistic conception, perhaps, but rather nice, we think). For those who remember that Citizen Kane died longing for Rosebud, the movie may take on a new meaning (or did you really think it was a sled?).

Talking Dirty

"Now fuck me!" she whispered, and her mouth twisted savagely. She lay crosswise on the bed, her skirl around her neck. "Pull it off!" she begged, too feverish to find the snaps. "I want you to fuck me as though you never had me before."

"Wait a minute," I said, pulling out. "I'm going to take these damned things off first."

"Quick, quick!" she pleaded. "Put it in all the way. Jesus, Val, I could never do without you.... Yes, good, good ... that's it." She was squirming like an eel. "Oh, Val, you must never let me go. Tight, hold me light! Oh, God, I'm coming...."

—Henry Miller, "The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus"

Great that you asked about this. With the right man, I love it, and I bet a lot of other women do, too. Why? Because it massages your imagination, lets you articulate your fantasies and just makes the whole thing so much more exciting. I think it also lets your partner know exactly what you want and what you like.

Female Respondent, Mid-20s, College Graduate, Single

There haven't been any major studies of how people talk (or don't talk) to each other when they're having sex, so we were venturing into uncharted waters when we asked, "Do you and your partner 'talk dirty' during sex?" It turns out that it's a good question. Two out of five men and nearly half of the women say they do.

And the odds are that if a woman has tried it, she has liked it. Talking dirty is the first type of experimental behavior we've discussed that seems to increase the likelihood of a woman's saying her sex life is satisfying. Four out of five women who have tried it say their sex lives are satisfying, while three quarters of those who haven't say they are. It has a slightly greater impact on male satisfaction.

Comfort elucidates in The Joy of Sex:

It is the one time when people are spiritually most naked. There is a striking consistency, over ages and continents, in what women say in orgasm. Japanese, Indian, French and English all babble about dying ... about Mother (they often call for her at the critical moment) and about religion even if they are atheists. This is natural—orgasm is the most religious moment of our lives, of which all other mystical kicks are a mere translation. Men are apt to growl like bears or utter aggressive monosyllables, like "In, in, in!" ... There are an infinite variety of sounds short of speech.... Some of the "words" are common—a gasp when a touch registers right, a shuddering outbreath when you follow through. Women, and some men, talk continuously in a sort of baby whisper or repeat four-letter words of the most unlikely kind....

Age and marital status don't have much to do with whether or not people use lewd language when making love—and with one exception, sexual identity doesn't, either. That one exception is that bisexual women experience dirty talk more than any other group of men or women, heterosexual or homosexual. Nearly two thirds of bisexual women say they've used lusty language during sex. By contrast, only 48 percent of the heterosexual women and 41 percent of the heterosexual men say so.

We'll close this section with a note we received from one of our female respondents about a variation of dirty sex talk that—at least in the ads we see in some sex magazines and newspapers—is popular with a small but vocal group:

This is one of my favorite things in life: There is nothing quite like a mutual-masturbation scene over the phone. You talk your partner through a real sex act that you have shared or a fantasy sex act that you know would interest your partner, then you come. It really works and is very erotic. Just ask around.

Having Sex In Public

We had a bit of a walk from the subway station to her home. Along the way, we stopped under a tree and started to mush it up. I had my hand up her dress and she was fumbling with my fly. We were leaning against a tree trunk.... She had just got my pecker out and was opening her legs for me to ram it home when suddenly, from the branches above, a huge black cat pounced on us, screaming as if in heat. We nearly dropped dead with fright....

— "The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus"

Having sex in public can be dangerous, as that passage illustrates. However, it's not the fear of being attacked by dogs or cats that grips most people who consider it but the fear of being caught by other people. Yet that fear is what heightens sexual excitement for those who willingly engage in it. And their numbers are surprisingly large. Thirty-seven percent of the men and 35 percent of the women say they have had public sex at least once.

The sex-life ratings of men who have experimented with sex in public follow the same pattern as for the other experimental behavior: The more a man experiments, the happier he is with his sex life. Two thirds of the men in our survey who have tried it say their sex lives are satisfying, while only 59 percent of those who haven't say they are.

Perhaps the greatest single factor related to public sex is number of partners—the more men and women have had, the greater the likelihood they've had public sex. Also, nonorgasmic women are the least likely to have tried it.

Since age, occupation, education, religion and where you live have little bearing on the likelihood of trying public sex, we suspect that many of those men and women who do it like the excitement that comes with risk taking.

Perhaps the best summation of the psychology of having sex in public is this one-line explanation from one of our male respondents: "She and I like to take chances."

Sex With More Than One Person At a Time

Maude looked on with a pleasant smile of satisfaction. I leaned forward and kissed Elsie's cunt.

"It's wonderful not to be jealous anymore, " said Maude very simply.

Elsie's face was scarlet. She didn't quite know what her role was, how far she dared go. She studied Maude intently, as though not altogether convinced of her sincerity. Now I was kissing Maude passionately, my fingers in Elsie's cunt the while. I felt Elsie pressing closer, moving herself. The juice was pouring over my fingers. At the same time, Maude raised herself and, shifting her bottom, adroitly managed to sink down again with my prick neatly fitted inside her. She was facing forward now, her face pressed against Elsie's breast. She raised her head and took the nipple in her mouth. Elsie gave a shudder and her cunt began to quiver with silken spasms. Now Maude's hand, which had been resting on Elsie's waist, slid down and caressed the smooth cheeks. In another moment, it had slipped farther down and encountered mine. I drew my hand away instinctively. Elsie shifted a little and then Maude leaned forward and placed her mouth on Elsie's cunt. At the same time Elsie bent forward, over Maude, and put her lips to mine. The three of us were now quivering as if we had the ague.

—"The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus"

About a third of the men (37 percent) and the women (34 percent) in our survey say they have had sex with two or more people at the same time.

When it comes to ménage à trois (à quatre, à cinq, etc.), we have to admit that our readers seem to be considerably more adventurous than the rest of the population, judging from the numbers of ménage-ers reported in other surveys. Hunt, for instance, found that only 13 percent of the married men and two percent of the married women who took part in his survey had had multiple-partner experiences. Or perhaps we're witnessing a sudden erosion of a long-standing American taboo: Thou shalt not have sex with more than one person at a time.

Still, we think that three-way sex remains, even in today's sexually liberal atmosphere, a fairly radical form of experimentation. Therefore, it's no surprise that people who have tried it are generally more experimental than people who haven't. Sixty-nine percent of the men who have tried three or more in bed and 82 percent of the women who have, have tried anal intercourse. Approximately half of the men and women who have had more than one partner at a time have also tried anal-oral contact and/or talking dirty during sex. In fact, the one experimental practice these folks don't try much is bondage.

At any rate, those who have tried sex in threesomes or more seem to be enjoying themselves. Sixty-four percent of the men and 75 percent of the women who have tried it say they're satisfied with their sex lives. The same holds true of both men's and women's opinions of themselves as lovers: Those who have tried sex with more than one person are more likely than not to say they're good lovers.

The question most people who haven't had a ménage à trois (or more) might ask of those who have is, Don't you ever feel jealous sharing your lover with another person? So it's interesting (and consistent) that when given the ultimate test of liberality, represented by the question Could you forgive your partner if he/she had an affair? people who have tried such a ménage, unlike the vast majority of people who haven't, show a tendency to forgive and forget. About 60 percent of them say they could forgive an affair, compared with fewer than 50 percent of those who haven't tried sex with two or more.

While education has little bearing on the likelihood that a person has tried sex with more than one person, age and income do matter to some extent. One out of four men between the ages of 21 and 29 has tried it, while one out of three men 30 and over has. Women of all ages report similar experience with multiple partners.

For women, income isn't much of a factor; but it seems that the more money a man makes, the more likely he is to have tried sex with two or more. Forty percent of those who earn more than $40,000 a year say they have, compared with only 27 percent of those who make $20,000 or less a year.

Marital status has a significant impact on the likelihood of a person's having tried the ménage arrangement. As with most of the other kinds of sexual experimentation, cohabitants report the most experience with three-way sex (41 percent of the males and 37 percent of the females) and married people report the least (25 percent of the men and 21 percent of the women). Those divorced, widowed or remarried aren't far behind the frolicsome cohabitants. For example, 39 percent of the remarried men and 34 percent of the divorced or widowed women have had a ménage at least once. (We can't say when they had them— perhaps before and after marriage—but they had them.) Only 29 percent of the single (and never married) people in our survey population have ever tried it: Swinging singles don't swing as much as you may think.

But the factor that, more than any other, influences the probability of your trying multiple-partner sex is sexual identity. In our survey, homosexual men and women and bisexual men are at least twice as likely to have tried multiple-partner sex as heterosexual men and women. Bisexual women report having had a ménage more frequently than any other group: Nearly 76 percent of them have tried three-way sex. Sixty-five percent of homosexual men say they've tried multiple-partner sex, followed by bisexual men, of whom 58 percent have tried it. Of heterosexuals, a little more than a quarter of the men have tried it, with women reporting only a slightly lower percentage.

If you're wondering what the most popular form of ménage à trois is for those who have tried it, it depends upon your sexual identity. For heterosexual men, the most popular mode is one man, two women (17 percent), followed by two men and one woman (11 percent). For heterosexual women, two men and one woman and two women and one man are equally popular (12 percent). For bisexual men, a threesome composed of three people of the same sex is as popular as doing it with one man and one woman. For homosexual men, doing it with two people of the same sex is far and away the most popular kind of group sex. Forty-two percent of the homosexual men who answered our survey have had sex with two other men and 21 percent have had sex with more than two people. Interestingly, homosexual women report a higher incidence of sex with one man and one woman (18 percent) than with two women (16 percent). That may be because (as we'll explain) men are more likely to instigate experimental sexual behavior—of all kinds and combinations—than women. For bisexual women, sex with one man and one woman is the head-and-shoulders favorite (34 percent), followed by sex with two men (20 percent).

Bondage

Bondage, or as the French call it, ligottage, is the gentle art of tying up your sex partner—not to overcome reluctance but to boost orgasm. It's one unscheduled sex technique which a lot of people find extremely exciting but are scared to try and a venerable human resource for increasing sexual feeling, partly because it's a harmless expression of sexual aggression—something we badly need, our culture being very uptight about it—and still more because of its physical effects: A slow orgasm when unable to move is a mind-blowing experience for anyone not too frightened of their own aggressive self to try it.

—"The Joy of Sex"

The first time we were in bed together, he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him. He was moody in a way that struck me as romantic; he was funny, bright, interesting to talk to; and he gave me pleasure.

The second time, he picked my scarf up off the floor where I had dropped it while getting undressed, smiled and said, "Would you let me blindfold you?" No one had blindfolded me in bed before and I liked it. I liked him even better than the first night and later couldn't stop smiling while brushing my teeth.

The third time, he repeatedly brought me to within a hairsbreadth of coming. When I was beside myself yet again and he stopped once more, I heard my voice, disembodied above the bed, pleading with him to continue. He obliged. I was beginning to fall in love.

The fourth time, when I was aroused enough to be fairly oblivious, he used the same scarf to tie my wrists together. That morning, he had sent 13 roses to my office. —Elizabeth Mc Neill, "Nine and a Half Weeks"

First, we should distinguish between simple bondage and sadomasochism, which often includes bondage. Simple bondage is just that: restraining someone (with rope, handcuffs, tied stockings, etc.) and then making love to him or her. Sadomasochism involves inflicting pain and treating the person in the passive role in a humiliating way. (Or, as Ray Parker, Jr., sings, "Beat me, whup me; break out the leather, baby.") Simple bondage does not involve either pain or humiliation.

We should also explain why we're including bondage in this list of experimental practices, since relatively small percentages of our respondents (17 percent of the women and 11 percent of the men) report having tried it. We include it because, when tabulating the responses of those who've tried bondage, we found that they were the most likely to have tried all of the experimental kinds of sex we've described. If there is a hierarchy of experimentiveness, so to speak, people who have tried bondage are at the top.

Half of the men who have tried it are between the ages of 21 and 29, and a whopping 62 percent of the women are in the same age range. The cohabitants of both sexes are most likely to have tried bondage.

Sexual identity is an important factor in a person's inclination to try bondage. Homosexual and bisexual men are twice as likely as straights to tie up their partners. Bisexual women engage in bondage more than anybody else, including homosexual men. Thirty-five percent of bisexual women say they've tried bondage, compared with 16 percent of the heterosexual women and 19 percent of the homosexual women. (Overall, bisexual women are more experimental with all sorts of sex.)

If you're wondering who is doing more tying down of whom, it seems just about even, if we are to judge from the bondage experimenters' answers to "Have you ever played a passive role in a partner's fantasy?" About two thirds of both men and women who have tried bondage say they have played a passive role, compared with 35 percent of the men and 29 percent of the women who have not tried bondage. Not surprisingly, a third of the men who say they have tried bondage have also tried S/M, but only a fourth of the women who say they have tried bondage have also tried S/M. People (both men and women) who have tried bondage are also more likely to have used a vibrator than are people who haven't tried it. Like those who have experimented with sex with more than one person, both men and women who have tried bondage report a higher degree of sexual satisfaction than do the rest of those in our survey population and also are likelier to consider themselves good lovers than are those who don't practice restraint.

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We'd like to make a few general observations on experimental sex. First of all, for some people, sexual experimentation is a form of risk taking, but not a blind risk. Most of the time, as we found, it increases sexual enjoyment. The likelihood of your sex life's being satisfying increases with the amount of experimenting you do. Fifty-two percent of the men who say they have never engaged in any experimental sex say they are satisfied with their sex lives; that percentage increases with the number of activities they have tried. The same holds true for the women who responded to our questionnaire, and they are more experimental than the men (23 percent of the men have never tried experimental sex, compared with 16 percent of the women).

It's worth noting that 74 percent of the women who say they have never tried experimental sex are satisfied with their sex lives. Not until we sample males who have tried five varieties of experimental sex do we get the same number who say their sex lives are satisfactory.

That raises a few questions for sociologists. Are women more easily satisfied than men? (Shere Hite, swallow your gum.) Or are women's expectations lower than men's? Or are men simply more demanding of variety than women? Whichever answer applies, it's time to say that even though women are generally more satisfied than men without sexual experimentation, with experimentation they become (in the immortal phraseology of Marvin Gaye) sat-is-fied. Those who have engaged in five or more types of experimental behavior—anal intercourse, talking dirty, anal-oral contact, sex with more than one person at a time and bondage—report an admirable 82 percent satisfaction rate.

The same pattern holds true for our respondents' opinions of themselves as lovers: The more experimenting they've done, the more likely they are to say they're good lovers.

We found that we can't categorize the type of person who's likely to try sexual experimentation, but one possible indicator for men is whether or not they feel comfortable talking about sex. Both men and women who say they are comfortable discussing the subject are more likely to experiment than are those who say they aren't comfortable discussing sex.

Despite the notion that people with strong religious commitments shun sex (and certainly experimental sex), the facts argue otherwise. For those who engage in anal intercourse, anal-oral contact, bondage, sex with more than one person at a time and talking dirty, the percentage of those who say they are very religious differs by only a few points from the percentage of those who say they are not religious at all. True, the very religious generally engage in those activities slightly less often than do those who are less religious, but the difference is so slight as to be inconsequential. Most surprising is the fact that women who describe themselves as "very religious" are just as likely as women who say they're only somewhat religious to have tried sex with more than one partner at a time and bondage—the two most experimental behaviors we've discussed. Apparently, in the nation whose religious tradition brought you witch-hunts and blue laws, what religion may or may not frown upon has little impact on what people do in their own bedrooms.

In line with that thought, we think it's appropriate to close with part of a letter we received from a woman who described both herself and her Mormon husband as believing "deeply in God":

Bruce and I believe the reason our love and marriage has lasted so long is twofold: good communication and sexual variety. Not to say our marriage is perfect. We've had our ups and downs—sexual, emotional and financial—over the past 17 years. But we've always worked together to solve our problems.

Bruce and I both had secret love affairs early in our marriage. The destructiveness of those secretive sexual encounters far outweighed their benefits. When we came to acknowledge our sexual needs openly, it actually strengthened our relationship instead of harming it. In the past 12 years, we have tried anything both of us wanted to do: a threesome for me and, for him, mild B and D and S/M, sexual encounters with an "outsider," fantasy sex games, oral sex, anal sex, etc. This experimental attitude has kept the magic in our sex life. We're not bored with each other and plan to find an even greater sexual variety in years to come. As the saying goes, you're not getting older, you're getting better!

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Are certain types of women more orgasmic than others, and if so, who are they? In the next installment of our series examining the results of our sex survey, we'll be taking a hard look at that most elusive and controversial of sexual phenomena, the female orgasm.

a continuing report on the state of the sexual union

"It's possible that the improved quality of porno films makes them more appealing to women...."

How Do You Rate With James Bond?

Here are the answers to The 007 Sex Quiz on page 94.

1. B

2. A

3. C

4. B

5. C

6. C

7. B

8. B

9. C

10. B

11. C

12. B

13. A

14. C

15. B

16. B

17. C

18. A

19. C

20. B

21. A

22. A

23. C

24. B

25. A

26. B

27. A

28. C

29. B

30. C

31. A

32. B

33. A

34. C

35. B

36. A

37. C

38. C

39. A

40. B

41. B

42. C

Scoring

Total your number of correct answers to see where you rank.

38-42 Excellent. Ian Fleming would be pleased. After this quiz, taking on Pussy, Kissy and Honey would be a snap.

30-37 Well done. Holly and Plenty would gladly have you. And vice versa, we're sure.

20-29 Not bad, but you could do better. Perhaps you've been paying a bit too much attention to the gadgets.

10-19 Back to spy school. Even Bibi

is disappointed.

0-9 Sorry. Rosa Klebb would like a word with you. Alone.

By Waller Lowe, Jr., in collaboration with Arthur Kretchmer, James R. Petersen, Barbara Nellis, Janet Lever and Rosanna Hertz.